The Emperor of Lies (35 page)

JEWISH YOUTH, DO NOT BELIEVE

THE LIES THEY ARE TELLING YOU . . .

They took our parents before our very eyes,

They took our brothers and sisters.

Where are the thousands of men recruited as labourers?

Where are the Jews deported at Yom Kippur?

Of those taken out through the gates of the ghetto

NOT A SINGLE ONE has returned.

ALL THE GESTAPO’S ROADS LEAD TO PONARY,

AND PONARY MEANS DEATH . . . !

This is from Vilna, he observed, with a dry matter-of-factness in his voice that was even more chilling than the contents of the document. – It’s near the border, some of the Jews there have already fled; but they’ve no weapons to defend themselves with, not like the ones in Warsaw.

Where’s Ponary?
is all she says.

He does not reply. He talks about Warsaw as if he’s lived there for years:

In Warsaw, of course, they have
kanalizacja
in the whole area covered by the ghetto. That means you can get weapons in through the sewer tunnels. The smugglers on the other side take fifty złoty for a German army pistol. The hard part is the ammunition. My informant in the ŻOB complains because the Polish home army won’t give them any. It’s just like here: the Poles in Warsaw refuse to put weapons into Jewish hands. They sometimes seem to be more scared of the Jews than they are of the Germans.

It suddenly felt as though the books all around them in the cold, cramped cellar room were borne up by nothing but a thin column of air and would come crashing down on them at any moment. Her first reaction was to put up her defences. How dare he tip all this knowledge into her lap, without first making sure she was ready, or even
wanted
to know? The suspicions that the deportations had in some places led to mass executions of undesirable Jewish elements: she has already heard those. Every employee in every
resort
did nothing but speculate on what the Germans’ real intentions were. But the fact that somewhere, in Warsaw or Lublin or Białystok, there was organised
resistance
to the German occupying forces going on – she had had no idea of that. And if that really were the case, she said, how could he stand there with that popeyed look of his and just
talk about it
? How could he, or how could they, not
do something
?

All that he did once she had blurted that out was to carry on staring at her, calm and assured. For the first time, she saw that there was something fanatical in his look, too: though well masked by hunger, there was a long-nurtured fury there:

Who wouldn’t
want
to? He said. But where would we get our weapons;
and however would we go about getting the Chairman’s permission to use them?

He laughed at his own joke. The laugh was perhaps what surprised her most. It was coarse and rasping, as if it was being drawn out of him on long chains. Then he sat there dumbly, staring down at himself with the same pale consternation in his eyes, as if startled from sleep, that he used to have when he looked at her.

She dealt with the forbidden documents he brought her in the way she had realised he wanted her to, and perhaps had intended her to from the start. Two pages of
Trybuna
were fixed inside a book about fire engines; she stuck articles from
Biuletyn Informacyjny
,
Dziennik Żołnierza
and
Głos Warszawy
between the pages of annual reports from the Mosaic congregation of Łódź. A monograph on that eminent son of the city, cloth manufacturer Israel Poznański, was thick enough to accommodate several pages of front-line reports snipped from the
Völkischer Beobachter
and
Litzmannstädter Zeitung
. As a way of marking which book and which shelf housed the forbidden texts, she thought out a simple code system with a combination of letters and numbers, which she wrote in pencil in the top right-hand corner of every typed index card.

After a couple of months’ work, the inner walls of the Palace were papered over with signs and messages of this kind. They ran invisibly but alive, back and forth across all the piles of books, in and out between spines and folders. But rather than propping up the sagging library as she had hoped, this simply made the remarkable book edifice seem even more fragile and unsafe. When that sensation was at its strongest, she had the strange feeling of being sucked down through the bottom of the cellar: like the powerful little eddy in a washbasin when the water runs down the plughole. And the sense of being sucked down was sometimes so intense that she had to hang on to the edge of her desk with both hands to stop herself being washed away.

It was the usual giddiness of hunger –

She recognised the faintness, the feeling of everything solid around her dissolving. Like the beer and soda labels did when she put the bottles to soak in the big washtub Maman reluctantly let her use.

(She could feel Maman’s fair hair tickling the back of her neck, the warm maternal body bending forward and enclosing her as she helped with careful fingers to tease the wet labels from the slippery bellies of the bottles.)

Everything around her was damp and porous. The light from the bulb Aleks had screwed into the fitting up by the ceiling shone with a bloated glare. She heard Aleks coming down with some food, heard the tinny clatter of the old milk can he brought the soup in. (Or was it a bit of dry bread rattling around in a shiny tea caddy?) One day he brought a glass jar of pickled gherkins.
My father’s a klayngertner
, he explained, in that slightly injured tone all the native Jews of Łódź seemed to adopt when speaking Yiddish.

But however much she ate, it didn’t help with the hollow suck of hunger, the sudden swirls of light-headedness and weakness. Or was it the claustrophobia of the place itself that was making her ill? The raw damp trickling out of the walls and rising in her painful neck and shoulder joints? The fact that she never got out into any proper light; or any proper darkness either: everything reduced to the same watery, dirty grey substance, a mixture of sludge, stinking coal smoke and dust.

She asked Aleks several times if she could come up and sit in the archive room a bit more often. He occasionally let her, though with reluctance, as if against his better judgement. But one morning he forbade it entirely.

The Chairman’s here
, was all he said, extending his head so far forward that he looked more like an angry watchdog than a harmless tortoise.

That day, Aleks hung about down in the cellar for an unusually long time. As if to reassure himself that the barked military orders and angry stamp of jackboots in the stairwell above would not be coming all the way down to them, to this ‘archive within the archive’ as he called it, which the two of them had built up together.

But even Aleks’s visits down to her were blurring round the edges. The next time he came, she did not for the life of her know whether he had just left or been gone for several days, only that she had noticed nothing. It was as if some imperceptible yet gigantic subsidence had happened inside her. Great swathes of time had vanished unnoticed.

She saw clearly now that she would not be capable of carrying out the task Rabbi Einhorn had asked her to perform. There were simply not enough books to describe all the catastrophes occurring daily on the other side of her over-cluttered cellar walls. When she explained this to Aleks, she tried to joke about it. She said it was ‘funny’ to think that she had got through almost everything in the ghetto – she had survived the crush and the hunger and the filthy conditions in the collective, Maman’s long illness, and their attempts to hide her from the Nazis’ purges! – and then she found herself in a warm, cosy basement room, doing a job that by ghetto standards must be considered light work, and what was more, with ‘lots of food’ – and suddenly it was all slipping from her grasp. It was in actual fact a single piece of news that had tipped the balance, a single page of newsprint that Aleks had put on her desk one morning. The tone of the article was defiant, mutinous; but that only made the true situation that much harder to conceal. She understood at once that the uprising in Warsaw that Aleks had told her about was now over and everyone who lived in the ghetto was dead; assuming, that is, there was a ghetto left at all:

Year after year, the Germans have portrayed themselves as representatives of a proud and invincible master race, and then a single night showed them to be nothing but a collection of mortal men who fall when a lethal bullet is directed at them.

They are not invincible! Nor will they win!

Now that the fortunes of war have turned in the East, resistance to Frank and his occupying forces will also grow here in Warsaw, and across Poland. Thanks to the resistance on the streets of Warsaw, not a single one of the murderers dared to return to the cellars and tunnels of the ghetto where their chosen victims were hiding. The supermen did not dare.
The supermen were scared
.

(J. Nowak)

That was the last newspaper article she archived – dated 19 May 1943.

And from that moment on, she remembers nothing more.

In her dream, she is standing with Aleks on the porch steps of the front entrance of the archive. Hundreds of other people are also crowded onto the steps, as if they, too, are waiting for the rain to stop. Vĕra has never seen such rain in all her life. It pours onto the shiny cobblestones and sluices down the roofs and fronts of the buildings. Every so often, the thunder sends dull tremors through the ground, shaking the whole foundation of the ghetto.

She and Aleks are standing side by side, as if the rain has wrapped them both together in a single warm coat. After a while she actually stops being aware that they are standing there at all. She is so warm with him.

Then it brightens up. A channel of clear blue sky opens up above them.

But only above the ghetto. On the other side of the barriers and barbed wire, the thunder goes on and the sky is thick and smooth and black with rain.

Through the pale, watery light, peacocks come strutting. At the foot of the wooden bridge, a tree has taken root: a giant ash, its roots bursting out of the hard paving-stones and its branches winding far above the parapet of the bridge. On the facades all around, which still bear the marks of the rain, greenery blossoms like shimmering butterfly wings. Striped blinds are wound up, window panes nudged open into the fresh air. In shady archways and in the courtyards, activities take place that could only happen in secret before. Horses are hitched, gleaming lengths of cloth are carefully rolled out or laid on wide tabletops; plates and glasses are set out. In Wiewiórka’s barber’s shop, the customers sit still unshaven, their faces all turned the same way, as if all listening to the same voice. But the only thing that can be heard from the loudspeakers mounted everywhere in the ghetto is the amplified sound of rain: a hurricane of rain, gushing and running in gutters and pipes.

She walks across the wet paving stones, but can feel that she no longer has a body. Or has the whole ghetto suddenly parted company with all that weighs it down on the ground? Doorways and house fronts go flicking past as if they were pages in a book, and – as if she too were entering the pages of a book – she slips past, through the archway and into the wide inner courtyards where the children are standing. It strikes her that she has never seen the ghetto courtyards like this before. They used always to look much more like deep shafts or fillers between the buildings, meaningless cavities full of clay, broken tiles and dumped rubbish. Now the well and the outhouses and the rows of privies are all clear and distinct; the pump and its handle are painted, the outhouses have trellises covering their walls and the tar-paper roofs of the privies have acquired low containing walls made of wood, and been filled with soil and turned into patches of garden, with cucumbers and tomatoes in long, industrious rows.

And then there are all the children . . .

They are standing in loose groups, as if they have come wading through tall grass and have suddenly stopped, the whites of their eyes empty and their faces as pale as leafless flower shoots.

There weren’t usually any children in the ghetto. There weren’t usually elderly men sitting beneath their prayer shawls, with the leather straps of their
tefillin
round their arms and their prayer books held open against their faces.

And there wasn’t usually rain, either; nor such a deep silence within that rain.

Behind all she is seeing now, behind the children and rain and silence, there is a sort of gorge of light: an internal channel without end. And she realises with utter clarity, and without a hint of fear, that this is what dying is like. All she has to do is let her paper-light body rise straight into the inexplicably clearing sky. And she thinks she must at all costs fight against this temptation; hang on in that disgusting, dark and evil dimension which is earth and body and weight and ghetto.

But things have already gone too far.

She finds no footing within herself any more. Even the light finds no footing.

Aleks scraped thin air from an old tin
can, and since the spoon seemed to be coming all the way to her mouth, she
decided to bite it. The spoon tasted of metal and air. Aleks moistened a crust
of bread in the soup and dabbed her sore lips gently with the bread, as you
might with a cloth or a sponge. At first she did not know what he was doing
there. But obviously, she must be alive. She was lying in the little ‘wallpaper
room’ in Brzezińska Street, on the dirty mattress where her mother had also
lain, and above and around were the walls her mother had smeared with faeces,
and way above was the little vent with the grille that could be pushed open or
pulled shut with the rod from below. Aleks was adjusting that rod now, so the
light would not shine too brightly in her eyes, but even though the light stung
them, and she was so weak she could hardly move her arms, she wanted the light
to stay, and she sat there in the light as if down in a bottomless well, while
he went on scraping out the tempting tin can with the spoon:

‘Well at least you’re eating,’ he said,
sounding pleased.

The remarkable thing was not that she
had survived, but that she seemed to have been able to make other people believe
she could carry on indefinitely. When her father managed to get a bed for Maman
at Mickeiwicz Street, Vĕra carried her on her back all the way downstairs from
the flat. That meant nobody saw how thin and worn out Vĕra’s own body had
become, and at the hospital she had been perpetually running around changing
soiled sheets and emptying bedpans. As if trying to outrun her own
exhaustion.

Josel said she must have caught the
infectious disease at the hospital. But this was categorically denied by Arnošt,
who said they had not had a single case of typhus fever since they moved to
Mickeiwicz Street –
the typhus vanished along with the
lice
, he said – and placed the blame instead on her work with the
books down in the dirty cellar archive.

She was still so weak she could neither
stand up nor raise and swivel her arm without her whole body starting to shake,
but Aleks arranged to borrow a wooden cart, like the one Kajsar Franz, the
rag-and-bone man from Franciszkańska Street, used for transporting his goods,
and in this Josel and Martin towed her out to Marysin.

Aleks Gliksman’s father was not just a
klayngertner
, as his son had modestly said,
but the top lawyer in the ghetto’s
Landvirtshaftopteil
, the department of the Palace responsible for
allocating all the land in the ghetto that was not built on or in use by a
resort
or a materials depot. In the early spring
of 1943, the Chairman had decided to divide the land in the ghetto once
cultivated by the former collectives into allotments to be allocated for private
use. The idea was that this would boost the ‘domestic’ production of fruit and
vegetables; but although Ehud Gliksman worked in the department, and although
this was the first time for several years that new plots had become available,
it was far from self-evident that he would have anything to do with the actual
distribution of the land. In the complicated system of dependence and debts of
gratitude, called in or as yet unexploited, that prevailed in the Palace, there
was always someone else who took priority. But presumably Aleks had been very
persistent. Vĕra could imagine the tenacity and insistence in his voice as he
spoke in support of the Schulz family from Prague, and their father was a
doctor, as well; so one day, as Vĕra was lying there in the wallpaper room at
the height of her illness – and even the ever-optimistic Arnošt seemed to have
given up hope – a small, grey form had arrived from the Department of
Agriculture, notifying the Schulz family that they had been selected to
‘responsibly tend and take charge of’
a vegetable
plot
. The formal address of the plot was 11:4 Marysińska Street (plot
no. 14), and it comprised fifteen square metres of stony soil right on the
corner, where Marysińska Street met Przelotna Street. The lease was for a year,
with a notice period of a month.

Aleks had experience of his own in
agricultural work. In the first years of the ghetto, he had been a member of the
Hashomer Hatsair collective, which ran a large-scale pioneer operation out in
Marysin. The
shomrim
of the ghetto had grown
potatoes, beets, white cabbage, carrots and sugar peas. And not just for
hazana
– the collective distribution of food –
but for the
future
, to
prepare themselves
, because in those days, Aleks
pointed out, everyone believed the war wasn’t going to last long and we’d soon
get to Palestine, the lot of us.

That was our place, he said, nodding
towards a stone building further down Próżna Street, its roof now caved in; we
used to lie there at nights and listen to the bats; there were loads of bats up
under the rafters. In those days, the Praeses often used to come and visit. We
set long tables and he would be the guest of honour. He was a different person
back then, you might almost say keen to please us; he would have dinner with us
and then we’d sit there and sing songs all evening, even love songs, said Aleks,
and then he sang (in a somewhat rasping voice, not particularly attractive, but
penetrating):

In
the land of Israel we must suffer.

I love
and I suffer,

But you
have no feelings

I will
pick flowers for myself

For
flowers can heal my painful heart.
¹¹

Later, the Praeses came back to us, but
he had completely changed:

It was at the time of the strikes at
the carpentry workshops in Drukarska and Urzędnicza that triggered off
disturbances and hunger riots, and he had to call in the Germans to crush the
demonstrations. And the Praeses was convinced it was in socialist circles, among
us, the
shomrim
and in the other collectives,
that the agitation against him had started. So he decided all the collective
farms in Marysin would be shut down, and anyone who didn’t report for other work
would have their workbook withdrawn.

That was in March 1941. We had two
choices. We could either join one of Praszkier’s digging teams and start burying
the dead out at Bracka Street; or we could help with the bricklaying work for
the extension of the Central Jail. Shlomo Hercberg was in charge of the prison
then, and he was as vile to the workers as he was to the prisoners. So neither
option was particularly tempting.

What happened next? asked Vĕra.

I should have resisted, of course. Like
some of the others wanted to. Maybe we’d have got rid of him then. But nobody
did anything. And he did at least have the sense, the Praeses, to listen to my
father’s protestations of my innocence and let me start at the archive. I’d
always taken the minutes for Hashomer, and when it came down to it, there
weren’t that many people in the ghetto who really knew how to write.

*

Allotment number fourteen turned out to
be a little way off the road behind a grey stone wall. Under the wall there was
a dilapidated wooden shed, its walls displaying more holes and cracks than solid
wood. The whole of Marysińska Street was lined with these ramshackle huts, a few
of them with a couple of windows to each wall and a brick chimney stack or a
very basic stove flue sticking out of the window. Some of the plots that went
with the sheds were small, some only an arm’s length wide; others were the size
of fields, and marked off by tall fences and gates.

All that spring, the Schulz children
went out there whenever they got a chance: on Sundays, but also after work if
they had the energy, and enough food at home to eat. Even Aleks turned up
occasionally. He said he couldn’t afford to lose her, and it must have been the
work on the books he was referring to, because he wasn’t much help with hoeing
and digging and weeding, despite all the experience he claimed to have. Josel
and Martin had made their own tools. Martin had bent a bit of old sheet metal
from a roof ridge to make a simple spade. A wooden pole with some nails stuck
through it became their rake. They sowed spinach and radishes, potatoes of
course; but also white and red cabbage, and beetroot, which also had edible
tops. They were known as
botwinki
in the
ghetto. For watering they had a sprinkler system consisting of a few lengths of
iron piping running from a metal tub Martin had managed to buy from the foreman
of one of the ghetto’s
Altmaterialressort
. He
got it for a reasonable price, presumably because it had a gaping hole in the
bottom. They heaved it up onto a tall wooden trestle they had found in the shed,
and Martin plugged the hole in the bottom with a spare saucepan lid. Then they
bored a small hole in the underside of the trestle, and inserted the metal
piping. Then all they had to do was fill the tub with water they got from
troughs and butts outside the other
działky
.
When it was time to put the sprinkler on, Martin clambered onto the wall with a
long metal rod with a hook on the end and nudged the saucepan lid a centimetre
or two, sending water gushing down the pipe from the tub, leaking from every
little hole and non-watertight join as it went.

As time went by, children took to
coming to watch them at work. Youngish children, aged from about five to no more
than ten; some of them were astonishingly clean and well dressed. There was one
particular boy of eight or so, who was dressed in a rib-knit woollen sweater
that scarcely reached his waist, knee-length shorts and worn-down
trepki
of the kind all the ghetto children wore
in all seasons and weathers. He had half a dozen companions of varying ages, who
clustered around him as though he were their natural leader. ‘They’re “rich
people’s children” , ’ said Aleks when he came out to visit one Sunday,
‘children of the
kierownicy
. Their parents have
already saved their lives once. Now they daren’t keep them in the centre of the
ghetto any longer.’

One day, when the children were as
usual standing in a circle round the garden wall, two men from the Sonder
appeared and asked to look at their workbooks, lease and licence. Martin handed
over the letter from the Department of Agriculture, and the two policemen bent
over it, hummed and hawed and swung on their heels. ‘That seems to be in order,’
said the elder of the two, folding and handing back the sheet of paper. ‘But
your seedlings won’t be left in peace for much longer.’ This last comment with a
nod back towards the wall, where the boy in the ribbed sweater was popping his
head up to try to see what the secret bit of paper was the policemen were
passing between them.

‘The Fifth Police District is a big
one, it’s hard to keep it all under surveillance,’ said the other policeman.
‘Especially the little
działky
like this, they
have problems unless they get extra protection.’

‘How much?’ asked Martin, who had
realised straight away the direction the conversation was taking.

The elder policeman cast an appraising
eye over the wall and frowned deeply as he did the calculations.

‘For a plot that size, generally around
fifty marks.’

‘A season?’ Martin asked.

‘A week,’ said the policeman. ‘We don’t
commit ourselves to anything longer-term than that. After all, neither you nor I
can say for sure what will happen in the ghetto next week, can we?’

But in the end they agreed to a
slightly lower price, and although they grumbled quite a bit about it being too
low, the policemen duly put in an appearance all through the autumn, and even
helped to weed the plot and turn the soil, and then to dig up the first of the
potatoes. One of them called himself Górski, and told them the wages were the
main reason he had joined Gertler’s Sonder – they got eight hundred marks a
month and two lots of soup a day – and those wages had enabled him to escape
di shpere
and hang on to all his children.
He had three, he told them proudly, all girls.

All through that long, mild autumn,
caravans of hungry city dwellers made their way out to Marysin each work-free
Sunday. Most were ordinary employees of the ghetto offices and departments, who
like the Schulz family had been favoured by the powers that be and become
responsible ‘landowners’. Many of them pushed wheelbarrows; others pulled little
wagons or handcarts containing their spades, buckets, forks and rakes, clearly
home-made just like Josel’s and Martin’s. It was a race against time. Winter,
der libe vinter
as the song called it,
would soon be here, and anything growing that had not been taken out of the
ground by then, when the frost came, would have to stay there until long into
the following year. Always assuming a new spring came at all.

The Gliksman family had a plot of their
own, not far from the Schulzes’. From there, Aleks brought them pumpkin seeds,
which they sowed by the wall once they had harvested the potatoes.

When they were working together at the
archive, Vĕra had never particularly noticed what Aleks looked like. He had
always had that way of creeping up on her, sideways and on the fringes; you
hardly ever saw him come or go. Now she could see how skinny he was. He had a
long scarf wound round his neck, and his ears protruded above it like a pair of
red pot handles. Only the eyes looking at her were still the same. Calm,
unwavering and curious.

They walked up Marysińska Street in the
dusky October light, and just as if it were an ordinary day in the archive, he
told her all the rumours he had snapped up. The Allies had taken Naples and got
a firm foothold on the Italian mainland. The Russian forces were nearing Kiev
and might soon retake the Ukrainian capital. And if Kiev fell, if the Ukraine
fell, then as everybody knew, it could only be a matter of time until the Red
Army reached the banks of the Weichsel.